Market entry and customer share have always been a key focus for network service providers. In the past, network service providers offered flat fees for unlimited bandwidth usage and guaranteed uninterrupted intenet service to entice new customers. To accommodate increasing internet traffic and guarantee uninterrupted service, network service providers would increase the bandwidth up to 50% more than was actually needed. While customers were happy, it was not long before network service providers realized that they would not be able to stay in business by offering a flat fee bandwidth supply cost structure to all subscribing customers regardless of actual customer usage. Network service providers needed a viable method of measuring and charging customers for actual bandwidth usage, thus the advent of real-time network bandwidth management service.
Real-time network bandwidth management service has become very important to network service providers. Internet Service Providers (ISP's) rely on real-time network bandwidth management service to monitor usage accounting and customer billing, to obtain usage and capacity scheduling information for planning future growth of the network, and to analyze unusual bandwidth patterns which may signify problems with the server or the ISP's equipment. Corporate Information Technology (IT) departments rely on real-time network bandwidth management service to control bandwidth expenses by monitoring usage pattern and behavior. Independent service providers rely on information obtained from real-time network bandwidth management service to design service level agreements (SLA's) and associated tariff structures to maximize profits. Furthermore, customers demand accountability for the access bandwidth charges by their ISP's.
Various techniques for real-time network bandwidth management service have been deployed with varying degrees of success. One technique is to modify the application bandwidth inside a network server. Another technique is to modify a network router with a Quality of Service (QOS) scheme. These methods are only marginally effective and offer limited performance because they use existing platforms optimized for other applications. A more popular technique utilizes a separate network bandwidth management control unit placed between a network router and switch. The separate network bandwidth management control unit is specifically designed to monitor customer bandwidth usage. However, the problem with this technique is that failure of the network bandwidth management control unit will cause an interrupt in customer network access and loss of customer bandwidth management data.
Considering the importance of network bandwidth management service information to network service providers and their customers, any interruption in network service or loss of network bandwidth management data could be very costly. A current method for avoiding network interruption due to failure of a bandwidth management control unit utilizes a bypass switch mechanism which bypasses the bandwidth management control unit and connects the network signal directly from the network router to the network switch. Although this prior art method avoids the problem of network access interruption, it does not resolve the problem of losing the critical network bandwidth management data.